This week Paul Thurott tells us that Microsoft's end has come into vision. I think that he's wrong, for now. It's a wordy article but toward the end he gets around to the point. He says that he no longer needs Excel. He just needs AI to build him a spreadsheet once a year.
Bill Gates always said that they were one innovation from going out of business. He used it to justify their anti-trust behavior.
I’m in this same boat with Excel. I’m not good at it and AI has opened a whole new world for me. Right now, I want Excel after AI has done its thing so I can do my minor adjustments and ask AI some additional questions. It’s unclear to me if that goes away.
I think the better example is Photoshop. I never created graphics or edited them before AI now I do and I don’t use any software to do it.
The difference is that editing graphics is a discrete project for me. I get a good enough graphic and I’m done. With Excel I’m not done. AI pushed me ahead further and faster than I could on my own, but I’m still not done because my Excel sheets are living. My graphic is one and done. I think this is an import distinction at least for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft added 33% to its Copilot sales last quarter. It languished before that. Copilot is different now that Anthropic is behind it and it’s neatly made Anthropic more usable for work.
Doesn’t Microsoft solve the M365 license decline problem outlined in this article by just combining the prices anyway? Instead of $30 plus $20 it’s just $50 next year? Let Microsoft sort out the departmental funding behind the scenes.
I think we are still too much in the weeds of early days to figure out who is dying and who is thriving. If you listen to OpenAI and Anthropic they are the ones dying as AI grows beyond their control or anyone’s control and does become the operating system. The need for design labs trends toward zero and the need for functional labs goes up, like Microsoft. On the other hand, they might just be parroting Microsoft’s early days and saying this as an excuse for bad behavior.
Read the article for yourself and let me know what you think.
